A path in the darkness - "non-fiction book, set in the aftermath of Guatemala's war..."

[Judi Lynn]

A path in the darkness

Francisco Goldman's first non-fiction book, set in the aftermath of Guatemala's war, may have influenced the recent elections. It also helped him overcome his own grief

Maya Jaggi
Saturday February 2, 2008
The Guardian

Francisco Goldman says he was a "naive, suburban American kid" until he spent time in Guatemala, his mother's birthplace, in his mid-20s. "I knew nothing. It was 1979, the most violent year of the war in Guatemala City. But I was writing surreal New York love stories," he says. Then a medical student friend smuggled him into the hospital morgue disguised as a doctor. "There were bodies piled up like firewood," he recalls. "Some were horribly mutilated, burned with cigarettes, or with their genitals cut off. It was like falling into a bottomless hole I've never completely crawled out of."

Goldman spent the next decade covering the wars in the US "backyard" of central America - mainly Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador - for the New Yorker and other magazines. The experience fed three richly baroque novels that map common terrain between the United States and Spanish-speaking America, and whose characters, like the author, inhabit both languages. The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), set in 1980s Guatemala, marries detective fiction with the polyphony of the Latin American boom novel. The Ordinary Seaman (1997), shortlisted for the Impac award, is a fable, written in the language of the barrio, about a crew of central American sailors marooned on a ghost ship in Brooklyn harbour. The Divine Husband (2004), a fictional portrait of the Cuban poet and liberation hero José Martí, traces ties between 19th-century Guatemala and New England.

His first non-fiction book draws him back to the aftermath of Guatemala's 36-year war, which ended in a peace agreement in 1996 and a controversial amnesty for war crimes. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? (published this week by Atlantic) is the result of Goldman's seven-year investigation into the killing of a Catholic priest in 1998. Juan Gerardi, a liberation theologian and human rights leader, was found bludgeoned to death in a garage in the capital, two days after publication of Guatemala: Never Again, a church-sponsored report implicating the government in the deaths of 200,000 civilians, many of them Mayan Indians.

A surreal cover-up entailed the arrest of a fellow priest - thought to be homosexual - and a cook. An old German shepherd dog, improbably suspected of having mauled the bishop to death, was impounded. But Church lawyers, dubbed the Untouchables, alleged a chain of responsibility reaching up to the president. In 2001, three army officers and a priest were jailed - verdicts finally upheld in a landmark constitutional court ruling last April. Goldman's book may have had an impact on last November's presidential elections in Guatemala, when the candidate General Otto Pérez Molina, whom Goldman names as possibly implicated in the case, was defeated.

The book, which explores a culture of impunity, rising narco-power and media manipulation, has drawn comparisons with Gabriel García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping (1996), as well as praise from Salman Rushdie and Richard Ford. For the fiction writer Junot Díaz, it "peels away sensational obfuscation to expose the lies, skulduggery and abuse of power in the aftermath of the proxy wars America is so good at. But it also speaks at a metaphorical level to a larger world. Frank is fearless; nothing could shake him off the track."
(snip)

Guatemala's war, which had roots in a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954, pitted guerrilla insurgents against the US-backed "counter-terror" of the army and death squads. "My two parts of the world were at war," Goldman says. "I thought US policy in central America was criminal, and that I could maybe influence it. It's partly what I do in fiction - give expression to voices that are not heard."

More:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2250722,00.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I hope someday life will inform these people of how completely unwelcome they are in a world anywhere near real people.

They need to be on their own filthy planet, living in darkness with only each other to prey upon.

[roody]

1. Are you connected to SOA Watch?

They are the most wonderful people on Earth!

[Judi Lynn]

2. No, not at this time. I've heard of Father Roy Bourgeois and others for many years,

and thought about the trips to Ft. Benning each year, and deeply admire their real strength in the face of moralizing, self-righteous killers.

They've been Americans who dare to challenge the country to put its money where its mouth is: either live up to its own image of righteousness, or retire that phoney act.

Speaking of connections, are you one of the DU'ers who has gone with the Pastors for Peace trip through Canada or Mexico in the caravans to take important supplies to Cuba? There are several, and I almost think I recall you've mentioned them several times.

That's one other tremendously meaningful way to spend time and energy, in the interest of a better world.

[roody]

3. Yes.